International

Robert Mugabe accused of breaching constitution to promote his ‘corrupt’ wife

July 22, 2008

A concerted drive by parliament and the people, with the backing of the military, is due to take place on Tuesday to try and force Robert Mugabe to resign. MPs will start impeachment proceedings against the President while hundreds of thousands of protesters are expected to march on his mansion vowing to put it under siege until he leaves.

But there were also reports that Mr Mugabe has called for a cabinet meeting on Tuesday as well to show that he is still in charge. A notice from his chief secretary has instructed all members to attend at 9am. The President is nonetheless still under house arrest and many of his ministers have been detained following last week’s military coup. The place where cabinet meetings are held, Munhumutapa Building in the centre of the capital, is now shut and guarded by soldiers and an armoured personnel carrier.

July 25, 2008

The moves come after an extraordinary and chaotic 24 hours in which Mr Mugabe apparently agreed to resign on state television but instead used the broadcast, sitting next to military commanders who are his captors, to vow that he will stay on in office to unify the nation and supervise reforms.

Mr Mugabe then ignored an ultimatum from his own party, Zanu-PF, which had stripped him of leadership, to resign by midday Monday or face impeachment. There are differing accounts of how long it will take to remove the President from office through the process, ranging from one day to more than a week.

February 27, 2002

Separately, the organisation of veterans who fought in the war against white minority rule has announced that it will take legal action at the High Court to force Mr Mugabe’s resignation. Its head, Christopher Mutsvangwa, charged that the President had condemned himself out of his own mouth when making his speech on which he admitted failures by his government. (Source: The Independent)

Justin Trudeau heads to Europe for NATO and G7 summits, where Trump’s ‘fireworks’ remain an expectation

May 25, 2016

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau heads to Europe this week for the NATO and G7 summits, where global leaders are trying to figure out exactly how the world works now that U.S. President Donald Trump is at the table.

The future of military alliances, the fight against climate change and even free trade all hang in the balance as the new man in the White House sits down and lets them all know his plans — or maybe not.

“Predicting what this president does would be virtually impossible,” said David Perry, a senior analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, delivering a common answer to the question of what to expect this week.

March 25, 2014

“Fireworks would be the baseline expectation of some sort.”

On Thursday, Trump, in the midst of his first foreign trip as U.S. president, will sit down with Trudeau and other leaders at the NATO summit at the group’s new headquarters in Brussels.

On Friday and Saturday, Trudeau and Trump will be in Taormina, a resort town in Sicily, for the G7 Summit.

John Kirton, director of the G8 Research Group at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, said this smaller forum with lots of opportunities for face-to-face talks is made for someone like Trump, who professes his passion for making deals.

July 27, 2006

Kirton said he expects the talks to focus on trying to convince Trump not to go through with his pledge to back out of the UN Paris Agreement on climate change, the role of China in the world and international trade.

But Kirton said the tenor of these talks might depend on how things go in Brussels. If things don’t go well at the NATO summit, the G7 meeting will have to be rapidly reconfigured into a repair job, he said. (Source: Toronto Star)

Who’s patiently waiting for Trump?

The US President-elect Donald Trump has admitted that he likes to keep people guessing. He’s a master manipulator as his book The Art of the Deal proudly portrays. “You tell a lie three times, they will believe anything. You tell people what they want to hear, play to their fantasies and then you close the deal,” he wrote. It worked like a dream during the campaign.

In less than two weeks, his biggest deal of all will finally be sealed. Only then will Americans and world leaders be able to distinguish between Trump the showman and the real deal of a man, who, according to some of his closest friends, is a charming, charismatic bon-vivant and a genuine patriot.

Without doubt many of those who perceive Trump as a saviour are in for a disappointment. His reach-out to veterans was overwhelmingly successful, but his plan to privatise veterans’ health care has dampened their enthusiasm.

His vow to get coal miners back to work, which helped him win Pennsylvania and Ohio, has been made harder to keep thanks to President Barack Obama’s parting regulatory shot and the fact that coal production is no longer economically viable due to cheaper oil and natural gas. Moreover, if he’s serious about imposing up to 45 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports to protect American manufacturers, that will not only result in inflation impacting the working class, but could incur World Trade Organisation penalties and kick-off a trade war that experts assert China is best-placed to win. Likewise, the governments of Canada and Mexico wait to see if Trump is serious about either renegotiating or dumping North American Free Trade Agreement. Canada says it would be willing to renegotiate terms. Mexico has flatly refused.

On the foreign policy front, heads of state are breathlessly waiting to know the score in the realisation that what Trump says now and what he will do are two different things. In this connection, President Vladimir Putin of Russia springs to mind.

Putin hopes for a reset in relations between Moscow and Washington, which he blames Obama for souring. Putin feels that his nation has been disrespected by the US in recent years and he wants to work with the new White House to resolve international crises provided the US sanctions are lifted and Russia is placed on an equal footing.

Signs are that he may get his wish; at least in the short term; that’s if Trump can skilfully manoeuvre between opening a new chapter with Russia — moving on — as he put it, with the hawkish anti-Russian sentiments expressed by senior figures in his own party. There is little divergence between the two men’s policies on Syria. Both see the need for eliminating terrorist elements and Trump has in the past referred to Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad as “a natural ally” in the fight against Daesh.

Trump tends to gravitate towards strongmen, and may be inclined to support Putin’s pick to head Libya, General Khalifa Haftar, whose forces have wrested back territory, including oil ports, from the control of Daesh, the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Trump’s senior security adviser James Woolsey says his boss will make the destruction of Daesh a priority, including in Libya.

However, despite what’s touted by the mainstream media as a Trump-Putin ‘bromance’, cracks in their tentatively friendly relationship could show-up once the US and Russian interests diverge. If there comes a time when those two massive egos clash, prepare for … well … anything. China could be a point of contention and so could Iran given Trump’s hostility to the nuclear deal.

There is arguably no one salivating more at the thought of Trump getting his feet under his new desk than the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump slammed Obama’s decision not to veto a recent UN resolution reaffirming the illegality of colony construction which he believes constitutes no obstacle to peace, and has given his approval for the US embassy to be relocated to Jerusalem.

Yet, he has also sworn to effect an Israel-Palestinian peace agreement, he characterises as “the ultimate deal” — and he has appointed Jason Greenblatt, a real estate lawyer and former Israeli West Bank colonist and armed guard to begin the process!

It’s not clear what British Prime Minister Theresa May really thinks of Trump. But she definitely wants to get in his good graces. She broke the ‘special relationship’s unwritten rule with her condemnation of John Kerry for a speech in which he criticises Israeli colonies as an obstacle to a two-state solution, even though his words echoed Britain’s long-held position.

Let’s not forget that among the cheerers and appeasers waiting for January 20th to dawn, there are millions of Americans, among them American-Muslims and undocumented migrants, living in terror of what the future might hold if Trump implements his campaign threats.

Uncertainty has become the new normal. The day Trump comes clean on his actual policies, strategies and global friends lists can’t come soon enough! (Source: GulfNews)

Stephen Colbert: Rio Olympics Are ‘Massive Catastrophe’

With the Summer Olympics in complete disarray, Stephen Colbert examined the mess in Rio: “I am pumped for the Rio games. They are less than two months away … or never,” Colbert said.

July 27, 2012

Just yesterday, Rio’s acting governor warned ‘The Olympics could be a big failure,’ which is actually an improvement because until yesterday, it looked like a massive catastrophe,” Colbert said.

“The Olympics are in real trouble: Many of the venues are still unfinished, possibly because over $10 billion dollars in construction contracts went to just five firms, all of which are already under investigation for price fixing and kickbacks, and this has already led to top executives being jailed or charged. Though on the plus side for those executives, the prisons won’t be completed until 2036.”

Colbert also pointed to Brazil’s ballooning violent crime rate and a police force strapped by budget shortfalls as reasons why this year’s Olympics could be a nightmare.

“But corruption and crime aren’t the only thing plaguing the Olympics: There is also actual plague,” Colbert said. “Because fear over the Zika virus, which can cause birth defects, has led some athletes to stay home, and others to take special precautions like freezing their sperm.”

Colbert then added some more reasons why the Rio Olympics might be doomed, from a heavily polluted Guanabara Bay, the site of some racing events, to the jaguar that was killed at an Olympics torch ceremony. “I believe that species of jaguar was the Spotted South American Metaphor,” Colbert said. (Source: Rolling Stone)